She Can’t Swallow

Can’t swallow? I thought. Gave the notion some time, and considered such a disability and its awfulness. Suction tubes. Dependence. Embarrassment.

Can’t swallow anymore.

I don’t believe I know this person, for she is a facebook friend of a friend sort of thing, but I was stricken when I read of her.

Here it is the Christmas season. We’re planning and cooking and wrapping gifts and hanging twinkle lights. We drink eggnog and write on cards and wait in line at the post office to buy stamps whose style we have selected from a poster the clerk indicated, and that way we get to decide whether to buy Santa Claus or the baby Jesus or something in between.

We writers do the writerly things of edits and proposals and agent chasing and dreams of bestseller lists and the scribbling of another draft and wrestling with fears of rejection, or an even worse agitation, perhaps, when we think of the resounding thump of no response, for have they not said on their site, “If you haven’t heard in 4 to 6 weeks, consider . . . ”

We photographers talk of light and settings and film and digits and lenses and focus and software and how much post-processing is okay.